“Venice: Pure City” by Peter Ackroyd (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 416 pages, $37.50)

The works of man are many and wondrous, but if I had to pick one that most completely embodies the concept of the sublime, it probably would be the autumnal view from the terrace of Venice’s Gritti Palace, across the Grand Canal, to the great church of Santa Maria della Salute — though I’m not sure I ever could satisfactorily explain precisely why.

In “Venice: Pure City”, Peter Ackroyd — the marvelously erudite and staggeringly industrious English writer — is the latest of his countrymen to appraise the experience of what remains of La Serenissima.

Ackroyd’s interpretation is at once less prescriptive and more grounded in Venice as it actually is — and has been. Readers familiar with his previous “biographies” of London and the River Thames will recognize the method here, which is to compile an encyclopedic amount of general and arcane factual information and then to arrange it less chronologically than thematically — much as one might encounter it in the course of a long walk over fascinating terrain in the company of a knowledgeable but never pedantic companion. It’s an experience rendered all the more agreeable by independent turn of Ackroyd’s critical imagination and lapidary quality of his prose. If this volume — the 32nd Ackroyd has produced — sometimes lacks the physical specificity that gave his earlier books a special illumination, “Venice: Pure City” more than makes up for it in range and realism where the temptation to romanticize is almost achingly palpable.

The subtitle draws on Ackroyd’s insight into Venice’s origins as Europe’s first willed city, a place brought into being by the marsh dwellers who bartered salt for the wherewithal to pound an urban space into the lagoons and islets of an Adriatic marshland. Like Los Angeles, in other words, Venice is one of those great cities that does not exist because it sits at the confluence of great rivers, is situated alongside a great natural harbor or sits astride important trade routes; Venice was willed into being and wrested the advantages of all those things from its industry.